Summary

We’re going to close our live coverage of the historic Falcon Heavy launch with a summary of the afternoon’s events.

Through a waterfall of cascading fire and smoke, SpaceX successfully launched its first Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket in operation anywhere in the world, and second only in strength to the Apollo-era leviathans that took crews to the moon.

The company then successfully separated its three rocket boosters, and landed two in a ballet of controlled burns. They landed onto parallel launchpads near where they took off in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The third booster was unaccounted for by the company. It was meant to land on a droneship in the Atlantic ocean, but the company did not explain its fate after a camera feed cut out from the vibrations of the rocket.

Billionaire founder Elon Musk successfully launched one of his Tesla Roadsters on a course toward Mars. He revealed surreal live video feeds of the car cruising around the planet, complete with a “Don’t Panic” dashboard message, a dummy astronaut in the driver’s seat, and David Bowie on the radio.

The success is a major step toward cheaper, more frequent spaceflight, making it easier for governments and businesses to lift massive projects into space or set off on deep space missions. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is estimated to cost $90m per launch; Nasa’s planned SLS rocket, a comparable system, is expected to cost about $1bn per flight.

Falcon Heavy: SpaceX's giant rocket launches successfully

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Roadster clear, core booster unaccounted for

The car continues its surreal path around the planet, somewhere distant above an entire continent.

Still no word from Musk or SpaceX about what happened to the core rocket booster, however. Their long silence suggests it did not land as planned on a ship in the Atlantic, but likely crashed into the sea.

Elon Musk has tweeted out an update on the upper stage – his Tesla Roadster is cruising through high-energy radiation belts circling the Earth, toward deep space.

The projected path of the car would bring it close to Mars, but Musk has said there is only an “extremely tiny” chance that it might crash into the planet. If it stays on course, it would instead drift through space, potentially for millions of years.

Reporting from Cape Canaveral, Richard Luscombe has spoken with fellow spectators – most in some stage of frazzled awe at the launch they just witnessed.

Sean Clark and his six-year-old daughter Maia watched the Falcon Heavy power into Florida’s clear blue skies, listened to the double sonic boom as the rocket’s boosters returned to Earth, and declared themselves stunned.

“It’s just wow,” said Mr Clark, who got Maia up before dawn to drive across Florida from Newport Richey to watch the launch at the space centre.

“It’s a whole new generation of kids getting excited about space. This is her third launch, she’s into space and science and I wanted to keep that interest going for the future. I came here for her future. It’s just amazing what Elon Musk has done and is doing.”

Cindy and Patrick Salkeld came from California to watch their first rocket launch.

“It was was overwhelming, better than expected, unbelievable. We couldn’t just see it, we could hear it and feel it vibrating the ground. It was emotional,” said Mrs Salkeld.

Elon Musk, her husband said, was “brilliant”.

“It’s incredible that not only did he get that rocket up there, but then he lands those two pieces right back on the ground upright, right on the circle. How on earth do you do that, it was spectacular.”

Nearby were other reporters, including Miriam Kramer for Mashable. She filmed the launch, capturing the liftoff’s roar. It’s palpable.

There’s still a mystery about the core rocket booster: it was supposed to land on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic, but smoke obscured the camera and then the feed cut out from vibrations on the deck.

It’s difficult to overstate what SpaceX has just accomplished: it’s successfully introduced a new heavy rocket to the world, the most powerful in operation and second only to the Apollo era, all through a private company and at a fraction of a cost of other systems currently in construction.

Nasa is working on its own heavy launch system, called the SLS, but it is estimated to cost about a billion dollars per flight. SpaceX estimates that Falcon Heavy launches will cost about $90m per flight.

What’s more, just a few years ago the notion of re-landing reusable rockets seemed like a pipe dream, and yet SpaceX has made it routine, with regular landings on land and on a drone ship floating in the Atlantic Ocean. Today it managed to land two Falcon 9 rockets simultaneously, each dropping gracefully from the sky with a controlled burn.